Kleist Heinrich von (1771–1811), German philosopher and literary figure whose entire work is based on the antinomy of reason and sentiment, one as impotent as the other, and reflects the Aufklärung crisis at the turn of the century. In 1799 he resigned from the Prussian army. Following a reading of Kant, he lost faith in a ‘life’s plan’ as inspired by Leibniz’s, Wolff’s, and Shaftesbury’s rationalism. He looked for salvation in Rousseau but concluded that sentiment revealed itself just as untrustworthy as reason as soon as man left the state of original grace and realized himself to be neither a puppet nor a god (see Essay on the Puppet Theater, 1810).
The Schroffenstein Family, Kleist’s first play (1802), repeats the Shakespearian theme of two young people who love each other but belong to warring families. One already finds in it the major elements of Kleist’s universe: the incapacity of the individual to master his fate, the theme of the tragic error, and the importance of the juridical. In 1803, Kleist returned to philosophy and literature and realized in Amphitryon (1806) the impossibility of the individual knowing himself and the world and acting deliberately in it. The divine order that is the norm of tragic art collapses, and with it, the principle of identity. Kleistian characters, ‘modern’ individuals, illustrate this normative chaos. The Broken Jug (a comedy written in 1806) shows Kleist’s interest in law. In his two parallel plays, Penthesilea and The Young Catherine of Heilbronn, Kleist presents an alternative: either ‘the marvelous order of the world’ and the theodicy that carries Catherine’s fate, or the sublime and apocryphal mission of the Christlike individual who must redeem the corrupt order. Before his suicide in 1811, Kleist looked toward the renaissance of the German nation for a historical way out of this metaphysical conflict.
See also LEIBNIZ, SHAFTESBURY, WOLFF. G.Ra.